In harmony

Daniel Barenboim is an Israeli and a world-famous conductor, Edward Said a Palestinian, renowned advocate of his people and a professor of literature. They tell Suzie Mackenzie about their unlikely friendship and their shared passion - music

It was some time in the mid-1990s, the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim says - "1994, 1995, I don't remember, anyway it doesn't matter" - but roughly a year or so after a chance meeting in a London hotel with Edward Said, the Palestinian writer and professor of literature at Columbia University, that he took the decision, "as a Jew and an Israeli citizen", to go to the West Bank to see for himself the plight of the Palestinians.

He had been privately critical for more than two decades of Israel's policy towards the Palestinians, "ever since Golda Meir's pronouncement in 1970 that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. I thought then, you can't say this, you can't turn a blind eye, say they don't exist."

He didn't want to go, he says, out of some spirit of empathy or compassion, but because the situation struck him as unjust. "That even though the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was an act of universal justice, it has to be recognised that it has been achieved at the price of displacement, grief and tragedy for others. We had been unable to see this then, in 1948. But it has become an absolute necessity for us to see it now."

Justice, he says, "strong ethics", is the basis of Jewish history, "as opposed to love which is the Christian tradition". And it was in this Jewish tradition that he went first and later returned twice - in 1999, and then again in 2002, to play a concert in Ramallah which resulted in death threats to himself and a headline in the Jerusalem Post, "With friends like Barenboim, who needs enemies?" So, as an outspoken critic of Israeli occupation of the West Bank ("It is wrong physically and morally - a corrupting influence, not just in the territories but back home"), Barenboim became vilified, "only by some", he points out, as an enemy to the land he loves.

Is this a definition of friendship? Does true friendship consist only in a sort of appeasement, as the Jerusalem Post implies, saying the right thing at the right time, a refusal to give offence? And is this "friendship" any better than the kind of friendship that exists only in adversity, cheering yourself up with empathy, going to Palestine, for example, to exhibit pity for the Palestinians - an emotional tourism? Barenboim went to play music, and before an audience who, he was well aware, might consider him the enemy. According to this definition, which is his, friendship on the side of justice will always carry with it a risk.

There are two sorts of people in the world, Barenboim says - and you can't but like him for this: "Those who like to converse only with those who agree with them, who get a sense of comfort from that. And others who are curious to hear a different point of view." It is one of the reasons he loves conducting. "Because in an orchestra you will have a number of great players, each of whom is creative and each with clear ideas of his own." In this sense, he says, an orchestra is a model of democracy, "because you have to leave space for others and therefore have no inhibitions about claiming a place for yourself".

In Ramallah, Barenboim claimed a place for himself on the side of justice, though he couldn't be sure of the Palestinian response. "It occurred to me that, for the first time in my life, I might have to face an audience that was unfriendly." He was almost afraid. But fear, as he says, is always a lack of knowledge. "It is lack of knowledge that brings instability, so it is important to know not only how to do something but why you are doing something. It is the same with music." They gave him a standing ovation which he likes to think is as much because he is an Israeli "who stretched out his hand", as that he is a world-famous musician. Or maybe a mix of both. "Usually the only Israeli they see is an Israeli soldier."

It was the same, Said says, a few years before when Barenboim gave a concert in Jerusalem. "I was there with him and the night before we had been to dinner at the home of a woman friend on the West Bank whose husband had just been deported." At the end of the concert, Barenboim thanked her for a wonderful evening, delicious food, denounced the deportation and dedicated his first encore to her. It was an extremely generous act, Said says. "And in this Daniel is quite unique in the music world. He likes to be engaged with the audience. Compared with someone like Brendel, who is more detached, aloof, Daniel is talkative."

Gladness not sadness is talkative, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt has written. "And truly human dialogue differs from mere talk, in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness." It is a wonderful idea this and it is the idea, the starting point, I think, for the book of dialogues, Parallels & Paradoxes, that Barenboim and Said have just published, conversations that took place over a period of five years, which they recorded, and based around the subject that for both is a source of gladness - music.

What is striking about these two friends, Said and Barenboim, two men from radically different backgrounds, yes, but both intellectuals and sharing a common history - their relationship to the Holy Land - is how different they are. Not because one is an Israeli, one a Palestinian - they are, as individuals, temperamentally opposed: one, easy, expansive, the other, Said, more cautious, despite his outspokenness.

Barenboim opens the door to his vast Claridge's suite - grand piano dwarfed in one corner, buckets of flowers - a napkin tucked into his shirt. He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand, "It's all rather grand, I'm afraid" - without sounding in the least bit contrite - and proceeds with his breakfast, a bowl of porridge. He is glad I have ordered tea, he adds, because with tea will come biscuits. Two things make him nervous, not eating and not sleeping. So he eats punctually and naps every afternoon.

Music has been his life since memory began. "There was music before I could speak, both my parents were piano teachers, we were not rich." And as a child, when someone came to their apartment, in Buenos Aires where he was born in 1942, "they came to have a piano lesson, so I thought the whole world played the piano. I never met anyone who didn't play the piano."

He was an only child and a brilliant child, "though the brilliance has gone, only the child remains", and he gave his first official concert at the age of seven. He has been performing all his life and his manner of speaking, half arrogance/authority, half self-deprecation/not too much authority - in elegant phrases that seem to spring fully formed from his lips - gives him a kind of comedic confidence. He is funny without you ever being certain that he means to be. He expects to be listened to and, though he denies it, he expects to be liked. "As a conductor, you have to give up any hope of being liked."

Does he think that being an only child, the focus of attention, knowing somehow always who he was, has made him self-absorbed? "I don't think so. It depends how you define it. There are people who see only themselves. But being self-absorbed can also mean that whatever you see, hear, experience, you find something for yourself in it. In other words, you relate everything to yourself and yourself to everything. And that I am." Being with him, it is impossible to relax. Every 10 minutes, he tells me he will have to leave in five minutes, so I find myself suspended between maximum tension, maximum concentration. This he does for an hour and a half.

And, of course, he is passionate. When asked why he felt the need to make a stand - why go to Ramallah? Why draw so much fire? - he replies, "What do you think music is about? Five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, people loved, hated, were jealous. We didn't invent human nature. How do you expect me to sit at home and just be a musician? That wouldn't be playing music. That would just be playing a selection of notes."

Music, he says, is a metaphor for life, "in the sense that music is in a constant state of becoming, it is making connections, between sounds, with things that are ephemeral." All of history, and all of his history, has been a demonstration of this. When he emigrated to Israel from Argentina in 1952, at the age of 10, Israel itself was in a state of becoming. "It was a socialist state in the best sense of the word socialist. The great problem with socialism is that you are made to feel that you work only for the state, not for the individual. But if there is no state and you are working towards it, then socialism has a totally different feel."

It is from here, he says, that his idea, his instinct for the connection between the individual and the collective was forged. And conducting, as he says, is the apotheosis of this. "Any professional conductor can make a professional orchestra play the way he wants them to play. But that's not music. Music is when the conductor and the orchestra breathe as from one collective lung."

It's probably fair to add at this point that Barenboim, for all his imperious confidence, is not a bully - his entire manner is the antithesis of coercion. You learn this as a parent, he says - he is the father of two sons. He worries about them and he knows you can't get it right as a parent. "I always believe you either treat them too long as babies or too soon as adults, you can't find the right moment because there is no right moment. And on the whole I would rather err on the side of treating them too soon as adults. That has some positive results, some negative."

It is all about balance, he says. And balance, he could have added, is a definition of friendship. Different notes played with one accord - harmony. Which is why he calls Said his friend. "Edward and I have different narratives, so our interpretation of the past is different. But of the present we are more or less in concord. And our interpretation of the future, for Israel/Palestine, is in essence the same. That there must be a way to live side by side, each in his own country but with open contact. Separation has no future."

Barenboim, as an Israeli, is situated on the side of power. He says, "We Jews, when we speak about the other, have to understand we are talking about those who depend on us, whose territory we have occupied." Said speaks on behalf of the dispossessed - characteristically a less negotiable position. Said is more dissonant than his friend, less at ease with himself, not less talkative, but more wary with words. Not surprising, perhaps, in a professor of literature aware of the weaponry of language.

We meet in his publisher's offices in London where he accepts a cup of coffee in a plastic mug - though he'd rather have water, he prefers not to ask. He looks quite tired, he sleeps little, "three hours a night". Barenboim has described him as "the ultimate Renaissance man" - a scholar, an accomplished pianist. Until his 20s, Said had the hope that he might become a professional musician - "In the end I wasn't good enough." And he is, of course, the most passionate, articulate and, in the west, most visible advocate of the Palestinian people.

Unlike Barenboim, who seems to have sprung fully formed into his world, it took Said almost 40 years to find his authentic voice, "my second self". It wasn't until 1973, soon after the Yom Kippur war, that he wrote his first political article for the New York Times. And you sense in him the diffidence of a man who has constructed himself from the outside.

For the past 10 years he has added to "his struggle" the battle against cancer - he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991, began treatment in 1994 and has been under constant medical supervision ever since. He indicates a large bulge where his stomach is and asks if he looks fat - as a child, his father used to tease him about his physique. The lump is a tumour, a metastasis from the leukaemia.

The cancer, he says, has changed him: "Of course. In the sense that you appreciate every day more." And he now finds it hard to travel long distances. "I couldn't, for example, go to Palestine. I always think of going back but I am too ill."

But he can lecture and he can teach and he believes not arrogantly but sincerely in the usefulness of this. That in the public realm there is a place "for the not standard voice, for the alternative voice. I am that and always have been."

Three things converged in Said's life in the early 90s. His illness, his meeting with Barenboim and his return to Palestine in 1992 for the first time since he had left in 1947. In 1994 he started work on his memoir, Out Of Place, an attempt to recuperate the "first self" he had left behind and to try to understand the confusion, inconsistencies and multiple contradictions that went into making his character.

He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 into a wealthy, cultivated family - his father was the owner of a stationery company with franchises in Palestine and Cairo. He spent much of his youth in Egypt, attending British colonial schools. He always wanted to be a good son, yet from an early age, from his father to his teachers, all authority figures rebuked him. He writes touchingly about how his rebel sensitivity was formed. His father was a bully and his mother sometimes smothering, sometimes cold. Even his cleverness didn't please them.

"Why do you insist on doing so badly?" his mother would ask him. Disgrace, fear, punishment seem to have been the template of his childhood and when he went to America in 1951, as a freshman to Princeton and then a graduate at Harvard, he has said he made a conscious decision to leave the past behind.

There is a poignancy in this friendship between Said and Barenboim - that within a few years of Said's family leaving Jerusalem for good, in 1947, Barenboim's family was moving in. Two opposing trajectories, one going home, one being expelled from home. But unlike Barenboim, Said didn't come from a safe place, an open world that inspired openness - that was music, his parents, the piano. And more significantly perhaps, he didn't come from trust.

Barenboim describes in his autobiography how, when in 1954 he was asked by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to play with the Berlin Philharmonic, his father said no. It was too soon after the war for a Jewish boy to travel from Israel to Germany. And Barenboim had no problem with this. In a parallel story at the end of his memoir, Said tells how he was betrayed by his father into signing an illegal business contract that resulted in him being banned from Cairo for 15 years.

From the moment they met, Said says, "We nattered. We have in common that we both feel our identity comes from a place where we no longer live and this gives us a relative freedom. And yet we both feel connected to that place."

It was Said who introduced Barenboim to his Palestinian friends. "I think when he was growing up in Israel he never met a Palestinian, they may as well have been on the moon." He was impressed by Barenboim's openness. And it was Barenboim who helped provide Said with a new musical focus.

In 1999 they formed together an orchestra, The East West Divan, inviting musicians from the Middle East to come to Weimar to play together. The idea, Said says, "was to provide a symbolic meeting in the world of ideas and music. Not to find a solution, but to provide a metaphor quite removed from politics. We don't discuss politics or if we do it is just one person saying, 'I think this or that.'

"Music then became the common framework, the abstract language of harmony. "Both of us share the primacy of the aesthetic, both of us are interested in how you deal with aesthetics in the world." Of course it sounds impressive, this search for a mutual framework, harmony out of discord.

But Said and Barenboim also have in common a certain intransigence to the world, a lack of compromise. Both have made large gestures - Said in his politics, Barenboim in his music - that have attracted controversy and, you could say, work in the opposite direction from concord. Said is, of course, an outspoken critic of Arafat and the Oslo peace process. "I acknowledge Arafat's great achievement after 1968 in putting together a Palestinian identity," he says, but on Oslo he remains unmovable.

"He gave them everything just to keep his power. It was the Palestinian Versailles. I have never forgiven him." Barenboim's position on Oslo is more tentative: "No matter what you think of the Oslo accord... it lost all chance of succeeding when the tempo, the speed at which it was proceeding, became so slow."

In their book, Said and Barenboim both argue the case for a lack of artistic compromise. But in the political world, Said's critics might say, he jeopardised the best they could get - Oslo - for a sort of perfectionism, an ideal good. And there may be some who will never forgive him.

The same could be said of Barenboim's decision to play Wagner in Jerusalem in 2000. That it was unnecessary, a grandstanding gesture, more likely to cause offence than to defend any principle - the artistic freedom to play what he chooses, where he chooses. "I don't have to play Wagner in Jerusalem, I can play my Wagner anywhere." So why did he?

He defends his decision: "Of course I understand that for some, Wagner evokes unbearable associations, I see that and I respect that." Those who don't want to hear it, he says, have the option to stay away. "I do not accept the fact that someone somewhere in their apartment suffers because Wagner is being played somewhere else." It's a fair point but it ignores the sensibility that would see Wagner not as complicit in the Holocaust - he was dead 50 years before the Nazis came to power - but complicit in the culture that produced Nazism. In history, some might say you don't become innocent just because you are dead - there is no neutral position.

The question of motivation will determine how the book is seen. Whether cynically, the "nattering" of two privileged intellectuals. Or optimistically, as people of good intent. In any conflict, on any side, there will be people of good will and people not of good will. And ultimately, how their dialogue, their unlikely friendship, is received will say more about us than it says about them

· Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations In Music And Society, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, is published by Bloomsbury, at £16.99.